"H" Is for the Hurt Behind the Humor

      As I continue strolling through the songs on my iPod, I've made it up to the letter "H". I'm surprised to find that 230 or so songs on my iPod right now begin with "H", but not so many of them are among my most favorite. Oh, there's plenty of good stuff, but it feels like A-G had more songs that I return to again and again. So picking an "H" theme proved more difficult than some of the previous letters...until I noticed how many of my "H" songs were either silly, or sad, or a little bit of both. Which got me thinking about the idea that a lot of humor has its basis in sorrow or pain. Slapstick is the most obvious example, of course, where the humor lies almost entirely in observing another's painful discomfiture and being glad it's not you. A lot of what makes us laugh is the same thing that would make us curl up in a corner and sob like a baby if we couldn't figure out how to hang a comic face on it. In that spirit I offer up my "H" songs, most of which have humor with at least a little hurt behind it.
      The Rainmakers were a great Missouri band who played an odd mix of hilarious rave-ups and more serious social satire, but everything they did came wrapped in a tight, catchy rock and roll bow. Lead singer and songwriter Bob Walkenhorst has not only a unique voice but also a biting wit and a great sense of musical humor ("Big Fat Blonde" still ranks for me as one of the great silly party songs of all time). "Hoo Dee Hoo" mixes their trademark upbeat guitar rock with a nonsense chorus and a surprisingly touching lyric of nostalgia and regret.

      "Hank" is a bluesy story-song by the Boston bar band Treat Her Right (some of its members, including the late Mark Sandman, later spun off to form Morphine). The song's narrator imagines a cry-in-your-beer story to explain the message found written on a dollar bill: "She lost. You won. I love her. Hank."

      I've been laser-burning new pits in my copy of Wilco's "Sky Blue Sky" with repeated listenings ever since it came out. Maybe I'm just getting old, but it seems harder and harder to find bands that are rock-solid musically and also produce songs with thoughtful lyrics about experiences from after college. Right now Wilco is my favorite band for grown-ups. "Hate it Here" is easily summarized by adding the line that immediately follows the title in the chorus, "since you're gone."

      And then there are the songs that just skip the humor altogether and go straight to the hurt. Sometimes the marriage of singer and song is so perfect that you just can't imagine the music and words in anyone else's voice. These final two "H" songs, "Has He Got a Friend for Me" performed by Maria McKee, and "Hurt" performed by Johnny Cash, are like that, though neither of these talented songwriters wrote the songs themselves (they were written by Richard Thompson and Trent Reznor, respectively). If someone had told me that Johnny Cash was going to cover Nine Inch Nails, and proceed to make the song his own, I probably would have thought it was some kind of joke. But watch the video. That one's Johnny's now.